"The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio" seems like the third in Julianna Moore's period Desperate Housewife trilogy, after "Far From Heaven" and "The Hours." Like those, this film shows the dark side of 1950's pre-feminist suburbia, but with an oddly optimistic spin, as the film veers from satire to feminist expose to sentimental nostalgia.
Baby boomer writer/director Jane Anderson captures the look of the 1950's much more accurately than most period films, which tend to be more influenced by "Grease" and "Happy Days" than reality. It's a pleasure to see a realistically messy house, lawn and piles of laundry. She lays on a bit thickly, but accurately, the pressures a pre-"Feminine Mystique" mother faced. First, there's the traps of those pre-pill ten kids and not having learned to drive a car. There's the pressure from the bank manager not to co-sign the mortgage to own her house with her husband, even though she had obtained the money for the down payment. There's the pressure from the cops and the family priest to put up with her alcoholic husband's rages, as they share drinks with him.
The opening production design promises more satire than it delivers, as Moore's Evelyn Ryan talks to the camera and enthusiastically chants jingles. The dark side of the endless consumerism pushed by the TV commercials is only hinted at with a brief excerpt or recreation of several shows or ads (the credits didn't seem to include acknowledgments for the various TV programs and commercials so the accuracy wasn't clear as some morph into real time seeming announcers and singers). Notably included is that font of maudlin macabre "Queen for A Day," that I used to run home from elementary school to catch, which saluted the most pathetic housewives by having them compete with tales of misery via the Applause Meter for a washing machine, or as shown here a wheel chair as it was a bathetic predecessor to today's "reality" helping shows. This sets the ironic stage for how Ryan as a determined cock-eyed optimist turned these relentlessly upbeat symbols on their ear to support her family through volumes of prize-winning doggerel.
Every now and then the film breaks through the difficulty of being based on a memoir by her daughter Terry who can only look back as a child and try to reveal what the adult was feeling. At one point the mother protests that she's "not a saint" as a few tart comments finally come out of her mouth and Moore powerfully shows us her emotions, such as her silent frustration as she's continually thwarted in her efforts to find time to even join with other women contesters, in a sort of pre-consciousness-raising women's group solidarity, though the touch of the endlessly cheerful contestant in the iron lung again veers towards satire. (As someone who was obsessed with couponing and successfully qualifying for freebies when I quit work to be home with babies, I absolutely sympathize with the pre-internet thrill of finding like-minded mothers.)
As a modern day female Pangloss, Moore only gets to show moments of doubt and pain and I actually sympathized with her husband for his criticism that she was "too happy." Woody Harrelson, as something of the villain of the piece, has to veer wildly from frustration to drunk to pitiful supplicant for forgiveness to emasculated breadloser, and he manages to stay amiable throughout to show why his wife and kids would keep forgiving him.
While her winning percentage symbolizes just how incredibly lucky the mother was, the ending loses any sense of social commentary and just gives way to unvarnished bio pic sentimentality, as "Schindler's List" style we see the successful adults and parents the kids became and what happened to each.
The child actors are wonderfully natural and their rapport with Moore is lovely.
The film is accurate in showing that what is thought of as "the Fifties' continued through 1963, with the costumes (especially the glasses and ladies' gloves, though I was a bit surprised that Moore never seemed to wear the same dress twice) and production design.
But the John Frizzell score and meager non-jingle music selections weren't very evocative and seemed mired in the earlier years of the story
Baby boomer writer/director Jane Anderson captures the look of the 1950's much more accurately than most period films, which tend to be more influenced by "Grease" and "Happy Days" than reality. It's a pleasure to see a realistically messy house, lawn and piles of laundry. She lays on a bit thickly, but accurately, the pressures a pre-"Feminine Mystique" mother faced. First, there's the traps of those pre-pill ten kids and not having learned to drive a car. There's the pressure from the bank manager not to co-sign the mortgage to own her house with her husband, even though she had obtained the money for the down payment. There's the pressure from the cops and the family priest to put up with her alcoholic husband's rages, as they share drinks with him.
The opening production design promises more satire than it delivers, as Moore's Evelyn Ryan talks to the camera and enthusiastically chants jingles. The dark side of the endless consumerism pushed by the TV commercials is only hinted at with a brief excerpt or recreation of several shows or ads (the credits didn't seem to include acknowledgments for the various TV programs and commercials so the accuracy wasn't clear as some morph into real time seeming announcers and singers). Notably included is that font of maudlin macabre "Queen for A Day," that I used to run home from elementary school to catch, which saluted the most pathetic housewives by having them compete with tales of misery via the Applause Meter for a washing machine, or as shown here a wheel chair as it was a bathetic predecessor to today's "reality" helping shows. This sets the ironic stage for how Ryan as a determined cock-eyed optimist turned these relentlessly upbeat symbols on their ear to support her family through volumes of prize-winning doggerel.
Every now and then the film breaks through the difficulty of being based on a memoir by her daughter Terry who can only look back as a child and try to reveal what the adult was feeling. At one point the mother protests that she's "not a saint" as a few tart comments finally come out of her mouth and Moore powerfully shows us her emotions, such as her silent frustration as she's continually thwarted in her efforts to find time to even join with other women contesters, in a sort of pre-consciousness-raising women's group solidarity, though the touch of the endlessly cheerful contestant in the iron lung again veers towards satire. (As someone who was obsessed with couponing and successfully qualifying for freebies when I quit work to be home with babies, I absolutely sympathize with the pre-internet thrill of finding like-minded mothers.)
As a modern day female Pangloss, Moore only gets to show moments of doubt and pain and I actually sympathized with her husband for his criticism that she was "too happy." Woody Harrelson, as something of the villain of the piece, has to veer wildly from frustration to drunk to pitiful supplicant for forgiveness to emasculated breadloser, and he manages to stay amiable throughout to show why his wife and kids would keep forgiving him.
While her winning percentage symbolizes just how incredibly lucky the mother was, the ending loses any sense of social commentary and just gives way to unvarnished bio pic sentimentality, as "Schindler's List" style we see the successful adults and parents the kids became and what happened to each.
The child actors are wonderfully natural and their rapport with Moore is lovely.
The film is accurate in showing that what is thought of as "the Fifties' continued through 1963, with the costumes (especially the glasses and ladies' gloves, though I was a bit surprised that Moore never seemed to wear the same dress twice) and production design.
But the John Frizzell score and meager non-jingle music selections weren't very evocative and seemed mired in the earlier years of the story